Geoff Duncan

Dear Commons Community,

Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) delivered a damning assessment of former President Donald Trump on Wednesday, declaring that: “He’s not God. He’s a loser.”

Duncan’s slam of the GOP nominee came during a CNN “NewsNight” panel discussion on Trump’s call for Republicans to force a government shutdown if Democrats fail to agree to laws to combat his fake voter fraud claims.

“I don’t know what I’m more mad at. I go back and forth minute to minute,” Duncan earlier admitted.

“Am I more mad at Donald Trump trying to sabotage good policy and good legislation to keep the trains on time?” he asked. “Or am I more mad that we’re at this epitome of stupidity again and half the people in that room couldn’t pass a high school economics class and don’t realize the damage that they’re doing just to try to prime up an extra 15 likes on Twitter?”

“It infuriates me to watch us get to this spot,” Duncan added. “If you really look at the mechanics of what’s going on, we’ve already budgeted the money and now we just don’t want to write the check for it. If we do that at home, we ultimately go to jail or get evicted or lose your car or your wife leaves you or something.”

Duncan faced Trump’s wrath following the 2020 election after he refused to help overturn the then-defeated incumbent’s loss to President Joe Biden.

Duncan initially endorsed Biden’s reelection campaign and has now publicly backed Kamala Harris for the White House.

“I think it’s important to reinforce the fact to Republicans around the country that just because you vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, doesn’t mean you’re Democrat,” Duncan said on CNN last month. “It just means you’re a patriot. You’re doing your duty as an American to step up to the plate and reclaim this country’s future.”

Duncan tells it like it is!

Tony

Sean O’Brien (Associated Press Photo/Julia Nikhinson)

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to endorse Donald Trump or Kamala Harris for president, saying neither candidate had sufficient support from the 1.3 million-member union. As reported by The Associated Press.

“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement. “We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries — and to honor our members’ right to strike — but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The Teamsters’ rebuff reflected a labor union torn over issues of political identity and policy, one that mirrors a broader national divide. Vice President Harris has unmistakably backed organized labor, while former President Trump has appealed to many white blue-collar workers even as he has openly scorned unions at times. By not endorsing anyone, the Teamsters are essentially ceding some influence in November’s election as both candidates claimed to have support from its members.

Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt noted in an emailed statement that more than three dozen retired Teamsters spoke last month in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, having endorsed Harris. Their pensions were saved through the 2021 passage of the Butch Lewis Act that President Joe Biden and Harris championed.

“While Donald Trump says striking workers should be fired, Vice President Harris has literally walked the picket line and stood strong with organized labor for her entire career,” Hitt said. “The Vice President’s strong union record is why Teamsters locals across the country have already endorsed her — alongside the overwhelming majority of organized labor.”

The Teamsters said Wednesday that internal polling of members showed Trump with an advantage over Harris, a fact that the Republican’s campaign immediately seized upon by sending out an email that said the “rank-and-file of the Teamsters Union supports Donald Trump for President.”

Trump called the Teamsters’ decision not to endorse “a great honor.”

“It’s a great honor,” he said. “They’re not going to endorse the Democrats. That’s a big thing.”

Harris met Monday with a panel of Teamsters, having long courted organized labor and made support for the middle class her central policy goal. Trump also met with a panel of Teamsters in January and even invited O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention, where the union leader railed against corporate greed.

In an interview Wednesday on Fox News, O’Brien said lack of an endorsement tells candidates that they have to back the Teamsters in the future. “This should be an eye opener for 2028,” he said. “If people want the support of the most powerful union in North America, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, start doing some things to support our members,” he said.

The Teamsters’ choice to not endorse came just weeks ahead of the Nov. 5 election, far later than endorsements by other large unions such as the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers and the United Auto Workers that have chosen to devote resources to getting out the vote for Harris.

With O’Brien facing a backlash from some Teamsters’ members after speaking at the Republican National Convention, it’s no surprise that the union decided not to make an endorsement, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University.

Trump’s praise of Tesla CEO Elon Musk for firing workers who supposedly went on strike really made a Trump endorsement very unlikely, Wheaton said. “The members were not in total agreement,” he said.

Marick Masters, a business professor emeritus at Wayne State University in Detroit who follows labor issues, said the Teamsters lack of an endorsement suggests a realignment within the union’s membership.

For many workers, issues such as gun control, abortion and border security override Trump’s expressions of hostility to unions, Masters said.

The Teamsters detailed their objections to the candidates in a statement, starting with their objection to a contract implemented by Congress in 2022 on members working in the railroad sector.

The union wanted both candidates to commit to not deploying the Railway Labor Act to resolve contract disputes and avoid a shutdown of national infrastructure, but Harris and Trump both wanted to keep that option open even though the Teamsters said it would reduce its bargaining power.

Harris has pledged to sign the PRO Act, which would strengthen union protections and is something the Teamsters support. Trump, in his roundtable with the Teamsters, did not promise to veto a proposal to make it harder nationwide to unionize.

Other unions have shown trepidation about endorsing either presidential candidate. The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America on Friday ultimately endorsed Harris with a caveat that “the manner in which party leaders engineered Biden’s replacement at the top of the ticket with Vice President Kamala Harris was thoroughly undemocratic,” union leadership said in a statement.

But the Teamsters lack of endorsement also suggests an indifference to the Biden-Harris administration, which signed into law a measure that saved the pensions of millions of union retirees, including many in the Teamsters.

As part of its 2021 pandemic aid, the administration included the Butch Lewis Act to save the underfunded pensions of more than 1 million union workers and retirees’ underfunded pensions. The act was named after a retired Ohio trucker and Teamsters union leader who spent the last years of his life fighting to prevent massive cuts to the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund.

I find this a surprising move on the part of the Teamsters that will have more ramifications for Harris than for Trump.

Tony

Source:  The New York Times.

Dear Commons Community,

As expected, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates yesterday by half a percentage point. This rate cut will have ramifications for consumers, savers, and the overall economy.  For consumers, it will mean lower interest rates on mortgages, car purchases, and credit-card debt. For savers, it will mean lower interest rates on CDs.  For the overall economy, here are six takeaways courtesy of The New York Times.

• The Fed’s decision lowers rates to about 4.9 percent, down from a more than two-decade high.
• Fed officials lowered interest rates because they are confident that inflation is coming back down to their 2 percent goal, and now they want to prevent the job market from softening further.
• Central bankers expect to cut interest rates more in the months to come, but they are not on a preset path, Mr. Powell said. They could speed up if the economy is weak and slow down if it’s strong.
• The Fed is keeping a wary eye on the uptick in unemployment, but for now it thinks the economy is basically strong.
• The Fed is feeling “growing confidence” that it can pull off the soft economic landing by lowering interest rates.
• In short, the Fed has pivoted to its rate cutting era, and there is more to come.

All in all, this should be good news for most Americans!

Tony

Courtesy of The New York Times.

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague David Bloomfieled alerted me to this story.

The number of New York City children missing school on a regular basis remains high, years after students returned to in-person learning following COVID-era lockdowns,  according to new figures released Monday.

Close to 35% of public school students were considered “chronically absent” during 2023-24, missing at least 10% of the school year, according to data from the Mayor’s Management Report. That’s roughly the same level as the year before, when 36% of students were chronically absent.  The absenteeism in New York City is higher than figures nationally (see graph above).

Before the pandemic, chronic absenteeism rates typically hovered around a quarter of students each year.

“These numbers should have started to come back to normal,” said David Bloomfield, a professor of education law and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “Persistent absenteeism has become routine for too many students and families. School attendance stopped being habitual; it stopped being routine.”

Chronic absenteeism soared during the pandemic, spiking at 41% during the 2021-22 school year — when many students were first returning to classrooms, and still spreading COVID-19 and following quarantine protocols. But even as vaccines became available and the health crisis faded from public view, student attendance was still spotty.

Sarah Part, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Children, said she’s continued to see students missing school because of issues with school transportation — exacerbated by a local policy that forces some migrant families with children to move shelters every 60 days — and a spike in mental health problems that has young adults avoiding their schools.

“There really needs to be a concerted effort to focus on this issue,” said Part. “Because it’s kind of self-evident — students who are absent have fewer opportunities to learn. So anything else this administration is trying to do, students have to be in school to benefit from those initiatives, to have the kind of impact we want.”

Education officials are trying to lower the chronic absenteeism rate to a goal of 29%, according to the report — widely viewed as the Adams administration’s yearly report card.

“Schools conducted extensive outreach, collaborated with community partners, and followed up daily with students and families to increase attendance,” it read.

The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but has said it has a variety of programs aimed at targeting kids who are chronically absent.

During a press conference Monday, Mayor Adams focused on numbers that show more families signed up for childcare and more young people living in NYCHA buildings were connected with jobs.

“This is just a small sample of what we have done,” Adams said of the findings. “We have more to do, we know that, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

You can’t learn if you are not there.

Tony

MSNBC/Youtube Gints Ivuskans/Shutterstock

Dear Commons Community,

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday shared her reaction to the latest apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life over the weekend, denouncing the former president’s decision to blame Democrats for the potential attack.

A 58-year-old suspect has been charged with federal gun crimes over his effort to try to assassinate the GOP presidential nominee while he was playing golf at his West Palm Beach club on Sunday. Trump was unharmed.

In an interview with Katie Couric in Washington, D.C., as part of her book tour for the release of her new memoir, Clinton said she was horrified to learn of the news.

“This is such a terrible thing to happen twice in our country in a relative short period of time and it’s frightening to see violence being threatened and used in a political campaign,” Clinton said.

Just nine weeks ago, the former president was shot at during an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump  pinned the blame for the latest attempt on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his main rival in the presidential race, saying they are responsible for motivating the suspect to target him.

“The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” he added.

Clinton said it was “regrettable” that Trump turned his assassination attempt, which she described as a “genuinely terrible event,” into a political attack against his Democratic rival.

“Everything that he talks about is about himself,” she said. “He doesn’t in any way try to reach out to people. He’s not interested in representing all of America and all of Americans and this is just another really regrettable incident of that.”

Clinton said Trump should have used the opportunity to call for calm and peace.

“If he were really a leader, he should be doing what he can to calm the waters, not try to just continue to throw red meat out there to get people riled up,” she said.

He is not a real leader. In fact, he is no leader at all!

Tony

Lunar eclipse on May 15, 2022. (Courtesy: Paul Nolte FugaFoto Low Altitude Imaging)

Dear Commons Community,

Tonight there will be  a partial lunar eclipse and supermoon.  

The spectacle will be visible in clear skies across North America and South America tonight and in Africa and Europe Wednesday morning.   According to NASA, the moon will enter Earth’s partial shadow at 8:41 PM EDT, but its  peak will occur at 10:44 p.m.

No special eye protection is needed to view a lunar eclipse. Viewers can stare at the moon with the naked eye or opt for binoculars and telescopes to get a closer look.

A partial lunar eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the sun and moon, casting a shadow that darkens a sliver of the moon and appears to take a bite out of it.

The supermoon will inch closer to Earth than usual and will appear a bit larger in the sky.

Here’s hoping for a clear sky!

Tony

Image:  Frederic Legrand – COMEO/ShutterStock Yin/Adobe Stock.

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Secret Service said yesterday it was aware of a post by billionaire Elon Musk on the X social media platform musing about an absence of assassination attempts on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Musk, who owns the platform, formerly known as Twitter, put up the post after a man suspected of planning to assassinate Republican former President Donald Trump at his golf course in West Palm Beach was arrested on Sunday.

A Trump supporter and the CEO of Tesla, Musk wrote on Sunday: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” a post he ended with an emoji of a face with a raised eyebrow. As reported by Reuters.

He was quickly criticized by X users from the left and right, who said they were concerned his words to nearly 200 million followers could incite violence against Biden and Harris.

Musk deleted the post but the Secret Service, tasked with protecting current and former presidents, vice presidents and other notable officials, took notice.

“The Secret Service is aware of the social media post made by Elon Musk and as a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence,” a spokesperson told Reuters in an email. “We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees.”

The spokesperson declined to specify whether the agency had reached out to Musk, who seemed to suggest in follow-up posts that he had been making a joke.

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X,” he wrote. “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Harris, a Democrat running against Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election, issued a statement on Sunday night as did Biden expressing relief and gratitude that Trump had not been harmed and condemning political violence.

The White House criticized Musk for his post.

“Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about. This rhetoric is irresponsible,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said on Monday.

Musk is such an accomplished individual.  Amazing he made such a stupid comment and on social media.

Tony

Buyout by Campus at Penn State System

Dear Commons Community,

At Pennsylvania State University at New Kensington, forty percent of the staff and 10 percent of the faculty there have taken voluntary buyouts that were offered across the system’s regional campuses earlier this year. Among those leaving the campus, where enrollment has dropped by about a third over the past 10 years, were the registrar, the director of student affairs, all three employees in the business and finance office, and the chancellor.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Buyouts are intended to be a humane way to cut costs while avoiding layoffs and allowing employees a measure of agency in deciding when to leave a job. But they can hurt morale and have unintended consequences, like when more people — or different ones than expected — raise their hands to go. That’s what many faculty and staff think happened at New Kensington.

While buyouts are fairly common in higher education as a way to reduce costs, according to Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, they are typically aimed at employees closer to retirement. “It’s not exactly the most strategic option, but it’s an option,” Kelchen said. “If the goal is to try to free up money or turn over the work force, it’s probably the best way to do it, but you have an issue of the people you really want to take the buyout may not take the buyout, or you have too many people take the buyout and a unit is effectively demolished.” In addition, he said, laws and union contracts mean colleges may have limited options for how they implement buyouts.

Across Penn State’s regional campuses (see chart above), about one in five eligible employees took the buyout, although the numbers varied significantly across the 20 institutions. Many left in June; the rest, who were asked to stay on to help ease the transition, will leave by the end of December.

This may also be a sign that unemployment is at an all-time low and that there are many opportunities to find new positions. It is a worker’s market.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Amazon is reverting to its pre-pandemic policy and will require corporate employees to be in the office five days a week starting next year, CEO Andy Jassy said yesterday.

Jassy said in a message shared with employees that the company’s leadership had been thinking in recent months about how to better “invent, collaborate and be connected enough to each other” to deliver the best results for customers and the business.

The company decided that bringing employees back into Amazon offices five days a week instead of the three currently required was a way to address that issue, the CEO said.

“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote in the memo, which Amazon also shared on its website. The policy takes effect on January 2, 2025.

Like many other companies, Amazon’s corporate employees worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the company saw massive gains from a boost in online shopping. In 2021, the tech giant implemented a policy that allowed leaders to determine how their teams worked.

In February 2023, Amazon asked all employees to come back to the office for three mandatory days, resulting in some protests from workers.

A few months later, Jassy said employees who were not happy about the change should learn to “disagree and commit.” He also issued somewhat of a subtle threat, saying it was “probably not going to work out” for those who refused to do so.

In his note yesterday, Jassy said the company has observed that it is easier for employees to “learn, model, practice and strengthen” Amazon’s culture and brainstorm when they’re together in person.

“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits,” he said.

Most interesting change in policy that will be followed by other businesses and organizations.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The vast majority of people in this country  have not had time nor the inclination to read the 30-chapter, 920-page Project 2025 conservative manifesto published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.  Stever Rattner, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, had a piece yesterday explaining eight ways that Project 2025 would change our country.  Here is a summary of Rattner’s essay.

1. Project 2025’s tax system would greatly benefit the wealthy

The 2025 plan would condense seven tax brackets into just two, leading to higher tax rates for lower-income Americans and lower rates for the rich.

2. Millions of people would be at risk of losing health care coverage if there are lifetime Medicaid caps

Almost 95 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid in 2021. If lifetime caps are implemented, over 19 million people, or 5% of the country’s population, would be at risk of losing their health care coverage.

3. Eliminate Headstart

4. Phase Out Title I

Project 2025 would phase out the $18 billion currently allocated to Title I, a key source of education aid, and return funding responsibility to the states.

5. End Student Loan Forgiveness

President Joe Biden’s effort to reduce the burden of student debt on young Americans would be ended and existing borrowers would have to repay the loans per their existing terms.

6. Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act

The conservative manifesto seeks to repeal large parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is principally aimed at facilitating a shift toward renewable energy.

7. Ban the Abortion Pill

8. Bolster Presidential Power

Project 2025 would reclassify policy-related positions, remove civil service protections and make federal employees easier to fire.

Trump has disavowed any connection to Project 2025 but the fingerprints of his associates are all over it.

Tony